An initiative by the EFFS (Euros For F°°°’s Sake!)
Please share your feedback about the elements below or voice out (log in first) if you just want to say hello, lurk or help out on site to join the team.
Situation
« Public Money? Public Code! », definitely. So should the reverse hold true: public money is needed to guarantee a lasting development and stable Public Infrastructures & Services.
→ We shouldn’t have to beg public money for developing free software!
After our societies created the current enclosures around intellectual artifacts (made “property”), Free Software led to build a new way of conceiving public infrastructure and services. This is still a work in progress that society and funding should embrace.
We care about a decentralised culture of Free Software. We cultivate the fork and mutual, self organisation, therefore our funding needs should be leveraged by this reality. We can organize in free software syndicates to highlight and mutualise our funding needs to respect our diversity.
Currently, the NGI programme by the European Commission is the main source for funding free software in Europe, which creates a dependency to a single, experimental programme while we have no guarantee it will be maintained over time.
Meanwhile, main contributors to open source are centralised capitalist tech among others G* or venture capitals that aim to maximise the profitability and cut the non-profitable parts.
Software that want to get some autonomy off of this economy or wish to work in European rather that US contexts are left behind the main capitalist funding sources.
As of now it seems there is not much solidarity with regards to funding, each project has its own way of addressing their needs and issues and we scarcely get together to formulate our needs.
Stakes of the edition
Organise to demand a long-term commitment from institutions and clarify what type of engagement we need.
Drawing the contours of future projects to carry together
Gather and legitimate community voice in defining the form of public software funding
Make us feel entitled to have a voice in issues that concern us as much as the rest of society.
Define modalities for structural, perennial funding for free software infrastructures.
Questions
We have some questions for you. If you wish to join in, please answer them as a reply to this post.
Which existing organisations let the community discuss collectively free software funding issues?
An org that is both representative and listen to community voices?
An org that works with public institutions and summarises needs?
An org that addresses those topics on a public interface?
What’s wrong between current funding (NGI, GSoC, Apache, Mozilla, foundations, state agencies) and free software communities?
Which stakeholders are financing the free software you’re using/working on?
Where are those issues addressed in your project?
What’s the budget of your project?
How much of the work engaged is paid? And what kind of job gets paid?
Did you work with other projects (software or not) to obtain those funds?
Which call for projects or public policies do you think we should engage?
Continuity
During previous editions, some work groups gathered people around specific aspects of our concerns.
The 3 historical, recurring topics are:
local organisation
collective data sovereignty
interoperability & power relations
During O₄FFDEM, some other ones were created out of the proposals we received.
Last edition's work groups
The Watershed WG was followed up by the creation of forum.hack2o.eu and the formalisation of the Hack₂O initiative.
The Fediversity WG gathered people working on or using federated calendar projects. An article summarized the discussion.
The Radio WG gave birth to several sound productions, including a podcast by the polish radio show Techno Enema. The french-speaking podcast Les mains dans la prise also embeds a report inside OFFDEM.
What would you think of replaceing Europe by Euros?
We’re considering to open up some topics for this edition :
one to discuss access to information about funds usage. IMO:
transparency seems necessary
monitoring sounds relevant but somehow authoritarian/corporate
trust is a fundamental community issue that enables/disables support
→ can we find a synthetic approach of these in a single topic?
one to discuss fairness and consideration of works
→ fair consideration sounds like an interesting topic to me for discussing what kinds of work are usally misconsidered (either under or over valued).
Transparency of what and to whom? For example, the OpenCollective model is very transparent to anybody, which I find problematic. With Julian Assange I’m for transparency for the State, and privacy for the rest of us (given that State transparency trumps corporate secrecy and enforces transparency of the State to its ‘business partners’).
Europeans for Fair Finance’s Sake?
Also means: engage with funding sources (e.g., Edge Funders) to organize the means to provide public funding to free software in the general interest. – I.e., there might be a thin line to draw between pet projects and _software that enables citizen’s mutual help (non-exhaustive example).
I guess the questions should circulate more. Maybe we can organize a mass mail to NGI0 grantees, or a form to gather such data and circulate a link on the Fediverse.
→ We shouldn’t have to beg public money for developing free software!
I’ve written many things about FOSS sustainability and the commons.
But if our governments want to secure the software supply chain, developers need to be paid for their time, as do contributors, and their support folks. I think that if a FOSS project has had Government funding at all, then some form of stipend should be paid no questions asked in perpetuity for as long as the code stays open for the public.
Does the EU and its member countries want digital sovereignty that’s not under threat from the Markets or the Governments where those walled gardens are based? Does the EU want a thriving market of innovation?
We can free the EU from reliance on American Corporate Infrastructure. But we need to develop new technology to fund this. Innovation comes from small organisations and small teams. Investment in EU Grassroots organisations will ripple out into their local communities.
Also means: engage with funding sources (e.g., Edge Funders) to organize the means to provide public funding to free software in the general interest. – I.e., there might be a thin line to draw between pet projects and _software that enables citizen’s mutual help (non-exhaustive example).
One of the difficulties we have, especially with NGI are the relationships and trust within the EU. Outside the EU, there’s limited funding available for FOSS, we need to try to encourage partnerships with fund matching overseas like NGI Atlantic and NGI Sargasso. But those like many of the Horizon Funds are limited to Incorporated Organisations and Universities.
So we need to not just organise our EU folks, but find allies elsewhere, in the Global South, and also Austrailia and New Zealand.
Years ago, I was looking at CSIRO in New South Wales and discovered that there were NGI like funding grants, but again part of business more than FOSS.
Our projects often have folks who are outside the remit of the EU and politically it’s difficult to fund those folks.
So how do we encourage collaboration and build political alliances with National Scientific (R and D) organization. How do we keep the grass roots going and ensure that Initiatives like the Present NGI doesn’t fizzle out like the US attempt to create a next generation internet did in the 2000s?
Yeah,
Let’s here all together strumming the harmonic strings with APC.org, like sending email / messages (ping @igorabsorto ).
And switching from global south to majority of the world in our verbatim.
We can here and now restart a discussion with https://openhardware.science/, they are sharing similar concerns, issues and crossroads.
But I do not want to be the only one crossing the bridge, not again.
Back to one of first asking:
Titling and words and vocabulary…
I’d be in favour of removing Europe from the title and the anagrams
